Tom Bilyeu | How to Actually Find Your Purpose

Tom Bilyeu - Find Your Purpose

Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of Quest Nutrition and CEO of Impact Theory talks about the day he suddenly realized that everything he had worked for was all for nothing. His story is one of courage, determination and the strength needed to build the life you want.

Transcript:

.. my parent's biggest frustration was that I was epically lazy, and if they handed out gold medals for being lazy, I would have won, I assure you, hands down.

Because even though I was a slightly chubby kid growing up in a morbidly obese family in Tacoma, Washington, I always knew two things about myself. One day I was gonna be rich, and I was gonna have six pack abs. Those were the two things, as that kid that was jiggling his belly thinking, "One day, I'm not gonna have to suck in my gut."

When I left for college, my own mother, who'd always been my biggest cheerleader, quietly assumed I was going to fail.

For these two guys that were successful entrepreneurs and body builders happened to walk into a class when I was a teacher. They were just starting a technology startup, and they said, "Hey, we need a copywriter. Why don't you come be a copywriter?" I was just young enough, and just dumb enough, and I went all in. They literally put me in the room with all the computer servers. But starting from there, I knew I could wow people, because I was willing to grind it out.

We all have a superpower, and my superpower may be the willingness and ability to endure suffering. I had suffered a lot. I hadn't taken a day off in six and a half years, because I was so hell-bent to get rich. Then I realized, almost eight and a half years in, I had finally had enough. I had hit my breaking point from suffering, and I got so mad, and I was so unwilling to do it anymore, and then I turned to my partners and I say, "I'm completely miserable. I quit."

I realized the reason. I was living the cliché of money can't buy happiness. Along the way, I had become so myopically focused on this promise I'd made to myself as a kid, that I never stopped to ask, "Why do I want to get rich?" The questions you ask yourself will determine the course of your life. I had been asking myself, "What do I need to do to get rich?" And it left me really unhappy. So, I changed the question, and I started asking, "What would I do and love every day, even if I were failing?"

Life is too short. This is your one go-round, so what are we going to do? We're going to build a company that's predicated on value. We're going to build a company that's predicated on passion.

I started thinking about my mom and my sister, but they were profoundly overweight. I started thinking about my uncle, who ate himself to death when I was 12 years old, and how much that scared me, and it made me sad. And it made me sad to see that there were millions, if not more than a billion people, that were in the same kind of abusive relationship with food that my mom and my sister were. So, I said, "I don't know if it's a big business, but I know it's a big problem." And that's the problem that we're going to solve.

We decided to build a totally new kind of company. We started Quest Nutrition in 2010, just as we were coming out of the great recession. I was wearing a hair net and a lab coat every day, and my employees were former gang members, ex-drug dealers, felons. We were in Compton, and we literally told everybody in the neighborhood, "I don't care if you've been convicted of a crime. I just want to know if you're willing to bust your ass to change your life, and if you are, you're going to get an interview. And I'm not going to ask for your resume. I don't care about your resume. Your resume tells me where you've been. It doesn't tell me the price you're willing to pay to become somebody new."

Every belief that you have is a choice. I choose to believe that human potential is nearly limitless, and this was the belief that changed my life, because once I realized, so it's not about who you are today, it's about who you want to become, and the price you're willing to pay to get there. I'll promise you, the day that you're willing to pay any price, you'll achieve what you want to achieve. If you truly believe that human potential is limitless, what do you want to become? And what price are you willing to pay to get there?